Posts tagged ‘Macondo’

US President Donald Trump has proposed eliminating the US Chemical Safety Board, a somewhat obscure agency that has angered so many groups over the years that no one is likely to leap to its defense.

The group is an independent government agency, much like the National Transportation Safety Board. While the NTSB investigates plane accidents and train derailments, the CSB probes refinery explosions and chemical accidents.

It is six years since a prominent newspaper dubbed BP’s chief executive the “most hated and clueless man in America” and in that time the company has paid $62 billion in fines and compensation for its role in the Macondo Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

In this week’s Oilgram News, Regulation and Environment, Gary Gentile looks at the after-effects of Deepwater Horizon on offshore production elsewhere and has a bonus segment about the future of the Renewable Fuels Standard in the US, which could impact both the oil industry and biofuels producers.

It has become a routine in Washington to explain the government’s inability to react to changes in the marketplace by blaming the swift pace of technological change. The latest such admission came last week when Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker spoke about US crude exports.

“Technology is advancing faster than existing regulations,” Pritzker said during an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival. She said there was a “serious conversation” going on within the administration on crude export policy. “The question is what [are] the right exports and what is the right amount of exports.”

Similar admissions have come from other officials on the topic of transporting crude by rail and ensuring the safety of offshore drilling. In all three cases, industry has wisely not waited for Washington to act. Innovation marches on and companies put huge amounts of capital at risk to advance new ways to produce and move energy resources.

When Tommy Beaudreau arrived at the US Interior Department to oversee the reorganization of the Minerals Management Service in the wake of the Macondo disaster, he found an agency more focused on revenue than safety.

Offshore leasing in federal waters was bringing MMS more than $10 billion each year in rents and royalties, and Congress seemed to judge an MMS director’s job performance strictly on how much revenue new oil and gas leasing could bring in to government coffers, said Beaudreau.

On the fourth anniversary of the Macondo oil spill on April 20, 2010, it’s fitting to recall another historic out-of-control well in the early days of the oil patch: Oklahoma’s Wild Mary Sudik.

The well was named for a real woman who by all accounts was a humble and sensible human being. “Wild” described not the woman, but the well that blew out on her property on March 26, 1930, and flowed for 11 days before it was capped.

Wikipedia, using historical and newspaper accounts, including those of the Oklahoma Historical Society, called the real Mary “modest.” It said she and her husband Vincent were Czech immigrants who bought a 160-acre dairy farm in 1904 and expanded it in 1924 to encompass the site of the future wild well. Because Mary signed the well lease first, wells on the property were named for her.

During the second phase of the BP trial now underway in US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana in New Orleans, the gushing stream of crude from the blown-out Macondo well in 2010 has been compared to exploding Champagne, air hissing from a leaky tire and oil squeezed from the pores on a teen-aged boy’s face.

The colorful metaphors employed by the attorneys in the case are an attempt to make understandable the incredibly complex fluid dynamics and physics at play during the 85 days that oil and natural gas leaked from the well. It is what needs to be done when the witnesses are top scientists, including Tom Hunter, who during his long career at the government’s Sandia National Laboratory looked after the health of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

Documents filed as part of a legal battle between BP and the US Environmental Protection Agency reveal just how far apart the two are when it comes to restoring BP’s ability to compete for lucrative government contracts or obtain offshore leases.

We just hit the three-year mark on the Macondo anniversary. In this week’s Regulation & Environment column from Oilgram News, Gary Gentile reviews the industry’s record on safety, and efforts to prevent another Macondo, since that time.